beheadings…'
Ava stared at me, waiting.
I looked at the floor. 'I'm required to return for them.'
She started shaking, then crying soundlessly, the tears flowing down her face. Her chest heaved and bucked and the ragged sobs broke through. She clenched her hands into fists and beat against the air.
Harry and I ran to her but she waved us away as though we were a cloud of wasps. As though my house had filled with indescribable pain, Ava opened the deck doors and escaped into the rain. I moved to follow her.
Harry, smarter than me, held me back.
We heard a few long loud moans like she was finding the key, and then Ava grabbed the railing, threw back her head, and started screaming like the world giving birth. Howls, shrieks, growls. She picked up a plastic chair and winged it off the deck, screaming between the bolts, beside them, and above them. She screamed to turn the night and the storm inside out. She grabbed the small table and flung it over the railing. The lightning flashed the world white and black and she screamed like she was going mad. Thunder rattled the foundations of my home and she screamed like she was going sane. She pulled off her left shoe and threw it at the rain. She howled, she moaned, she bellowed.
She sounded sad and angry and together and apart and all pounded by rain and electrified by the night. She pulled off her right shoe and threw it at the sky. The storm roared at her and she roared back, charged and defiant. She peeled away her clothes and gave them to the wind.
Harry turned away and began pulling on his raincoat.
I went out to join Ava.
The morning smelled pure enough to drink when we awakened at dawn. The storm slipped north around 3:00 a.m.' the only relics of its passing were breeze in the sea grasses and the pockmark stippling of the sand.
I opened the window to the sound of waves.
Ava rolled toward me, her eyes calm and steady. 'I wasn't thinking of such things last night, but we could have been electrocuted, you know, on the deck.'
Her forehead was warm beneath my kiss. 'Yes, and wouldn't that have confounded them that found us?'
It had amazed me last night, the possibilities of joy, even in a weakened condition with one working arm. First on the rain-swept deck, the rain only against our skins, far away from where we were, then, later, rocking the bed as the rain softened to a sussurious undercurrent.
The possibilities continued afresh: We spent the opening hours in experimentation with the new. Whether to be shy while naked and dressing (neither of us was stricken with false modesty), whether to touch in passing (yes, lightly), who would instigate another session of lovemaking (a tie). Ava inspected my dressings and applied another round of the salve. Neither of us mentioned the cause of the burns, a tacit agreement allowing refreshment at the small oasis blooming in our lives. It was only mentioned as I left for work.
'When you go again,' Ava said, 'to see your brother?' 'Yes?'
'I'm coming with you. Don't give me that look. I'm as good as there.'
At four Harry made a run to the bank, and I'd started a half-hearted run to Billie Messer's, Nelson's aunt. I was going to reinterview everyone if that's what it took, hoping to shake something, anything, loose. My phone rang, Harry.
'Cars, we've got another one. A beheading. I'm there now.' Harry gave me the address. His voice was tight, clipped.
I said, 'What's the physical type?'
Harry took a breath. 'You know how big Burlew is?'
'The vic's as big as Burlew?'
'Same exact size,' Harry said. 'It is Burlew.'
I'd never seen anything like Burlew's home that wasn't in a hothouse.
Orchids flourished everywhere: shelves, low tables, hanging baskets, driftwood fixed to the walls. Some bloomed pink trumpets, others squirted pearlescent bells. There were red cups and blue saucers, yellow lanterns and lavendar chandeliers. A small solarium off the dining room seemed the incubator, cuttings and plant lets getting their legs in small brown pots. The air smelled dense with fecundity, as if you could sprout seeds by letting them drop from your palm.
Burlew's headless body was supine in the kitchen. Squill had been and gone. I figured there were heavy-duty meetings among the bras shat clan. Hembree and his people were finishing up, two techs stowing gear. Harry and I stood in the living room, pressed close by the plants at our backs.
I said, 'I been meaning to ask about what you and Burlew were walking around yesterday. Giddy-up?'
Harry studied the peaceful jungle around us. He reached to a shelf and touched a white cascade of tubular blossoms. 'Look like candles, don't they?' he mused.
'Burlew and you shared a car?' I asked. 'You were partners?'
'Not long after he'd left his training officer. I was twenty-eight, he was twenty-four.'
'You and Burlew on the streets together? Strange brew.'
'Back then he wasn't the Burlew you knew. You could talk to him. He even looked different, a tall, lanky, wide-shouldered country boy.'
A wall-mounted branch beside Harry's head cradled an orchid: a garland of jingle-bell blossoms dangling from a spray of leaves. Harry flicked a blossom and seemed surprised when it didn't ring.
'We got a call to the Tallrico Apartments, that sprawling scruff-hole out northwest. Resident said she'd seen a man with a gun running around. It was maybe two a.m. We rolled up and rolled out, Burlew left, me right. I ended up with some woman babbling about a giggling guy waving a gun and running crazy around the place. I left her and went off to see what Burlew'd come up with, but couldn't find him.'
Hembree waved me into the kitchen. I flipped my index finger up, one minute.
'I heard a commotion from the left and doubled back that way. Heard sounds from the back of the building, voices. I crept back to the trash bins.'
Harry made sure no one else was near and leaned close enough to warm my ear with his breath. 'Burlew was stark naked on the ground with this skinny little guy riding him like a horse. The guy had a brain-load of uppers and downers and acid and was zooming with the asteroids. He'd gotten Burlew's gun and was jumping him through the hoops he'd always fantasized about putting cops through. Burlew was crying, crawling in filth, pissing down his thigh, hands and knees ripped up from busted glass. The guy's banging his gun against Burlew's head, yelling giddy-up and whoopy ti-yay. He's got Burlew making horsey sounds, whinnying.'
I closed my eyes and saw the pictures. 'You dropped the guy'
'The looney's waving the gun like a fly swatter I waited until he'd swung it off Burlew and I stepped around the corner yelling, 'Police.
Freeze.' I had about another half ounce to go on that trigger. The guy smiled like I was his mama bringing him a bowl of warm oatmeal and laid the gun on the ground. He sat next to it and started picking at his face.'
The fingerprint guy walked past, bag in hand. Hembree was waving me over like a windmill.
I yelled, 'One minute, Bree. Hang on, dammit,' and turned back to Harry.
'That night Burlew broke down and told me how he hated being on the streets; how his old man, a cop, made Burlew be a cop, no choice. He had an uncle was a landscaper, gardener; that's what Burlew secretly wanted to be.'
'Was that Burlew's last day on the street?'
Harry nodded. 'Next morning he applied for an admin position.'
'When'd he become the bottomless box of toothaches?'
'He started lifting, power stuff, bulk. The bigger he got the meaner he got.'
Harry studied a small bloom in a hanging basket, a chartreuse pennant the size of a dime. 'Burlew put on muscles like a costume. Then he had to drag the muscles around with him, too. He got hitched up with Squill's detail a few years back, became his de facto adjutant. I think Squill liked to have a guy Burlew's size with him like a short guy strutting behind a pit bull.'
'Burlew ever talk about that night?' I asked.
'He never looked at me again unless it was on his way to look past me.'
Harry shook his head and let the pennant drift from his fingertips.
'Every year when I was little my aunt used to read A Christmas Carol to me. I loved it but it scared me. What
